by Paul Monette
They walked to the door together, quiet and lost in thought. They seemed to want to get out in the open, carbon monoxide or not. It was the kind of day they’d grown up in, after all—the afternoon sun grown long and dusty in the hills above the boulevard.
“Good luck,” said Whitworth cheerfully, leaning in his doorway. He raised a cautionary finger one last time. “Remember—pedestrian’s got the right of way.”
“Hey, Whitworth—thanks.”
“No matter what you do,” he said, “don’t ask directions. You can’t get very lost. Besides, you might turn up on the edge of a view that goes all the way to Hawaii.”
They gave each other a kind of salute, with the better part of a wink thrown in, and then she started off. She stuck to the heavy traffic of the boulevard, all the way through West Hollywood. She resisted the impulse to climb uphill to Sunset. For a while at least, she wanted to walk a purely city street, so she’d have it to leave behind.
Did she still believe it was just a bookish thing she had embarked on? If so, then she should have been hearing echoes of Thoreau in the clamorous street, sounding like the murmurs of a long-forgotten dream. Yet before she had clocked her first half mile, the checklist she’d been making up—as to whether L.A. was deep as Walden Pond—had slipped her mind entirely. Walking here in the midst of a thousand daily lives, she began to understand that, for all his talk of foxes, loons, and morning fog, Thoreau did not go walking with his mind on the woods around him. Probably the reverse. The woods were there to let his mind run free.
And where the freedom took her was back to Jasper Cokes. She was so surprised to see his face rise up at the edge of consciousness that she went two blocks repeating his name, as if to reacquaint herself. She put it down to the randomness of memory, assuming he would vanish now as quickly as he came. She tried to fix on the street’s pop trail of unrelated matters—the car wash next to the pillared bank, the boutiques on the brink of receivership. She hoped the course of ordinary life would break upon her, the way it had in the Valley, the night she fled from Steepside.
Odd to think she could live eight years in Hollywood and not see there were no repeat performances.
So this was grief, she thought, as she batted back the tears and picked up speed. She gave it the coldest welcome she could summon. But once it had a grip, it took everything in its path—advancing now like a wall of fire, till there was no place to turn. She resisted the darker light of the past, even as it gleamed in the road ahead. Why go into it now? she thought. Far better the tale that had grown up around them over the years. At least she could close it like a book. She had a right to be left in peace—for having survived him, if nothing else.
There were things here and there, of course—things not even Carl and Artie knew. How, maybe once a year, she and Jasper would draw an evening out till they were all alone. Splitting a snifter of B & B, they would settle down to have it out, propped on the pillows in one or the other’s bed. They reeled off all their recent items, couched in the innuendo of the gossip-monger’s trade. The nonsense put out about them struck them so funny, they wept with laughter. Reveling in their comic-book personae, they laughed off, petal by petal, the artificial flower of public life.
Till the one who was meant to leave would contrive to stay on a moment longer. Something clicked. They climbed in under the covers, tittering like schoolgirls. Thus did they defy the ironies that crowded them. With the lights all out, they were safe as kids in a cubbyhole. Talked and talked till they fell asleep. But they knew when enough was enough, as well. Some time before dawn, like Cupid in flight, the one whose room was across the house got up and crept away. As if morning were much too much of a risk, and breakfast a curse of fate reserved for the disillusioned.
Strange, she thought, how even grief was a thing you got used to fast. She didn’t double up with pain, the way she’d always supposed she would. The effect was more like fever. These were the stinging sort of tears. They ached and burned, but they didn’t blur the vision. Rather, they seemed to enhance it, like the morning after rain. Nothing got in the way of the hard-edged outside world she walked through. She took it all in as never before.
When she reached the border of Beverly Hills, she crossed through a fountained park that made it seem the weather had changed—as if this part of town were climate-controlled to seventy-two degrees. There were trees of every sort, like an arboretum. Beds of roses and creeping vines. Flowers to cut by the basketful. The blooming shrubs were on fire with color. The rocks on the lawns looked to be imported, the moss applied by hand.
She hung a right at the next corner and felt an uphill slant to the land. She was having to do more work to keep the pace—a thing she didn’t know she had, till she felt she must maintain it. The houses on this street, she thought, must go as high as five or six. The old tall palms trailed up the sidewalks into the distance. The vivid gardens were ripe with April growth. Though some front yards were sculpted so as to look like holes of miniature golf, the flowers were no less bright and perfect. One had to learn to cultivate a double focus—so as not to overlook a single blossom, even as one avoided all the overblown bouquet.
She saw it was going to be hours before she got home, if she meant to start as far back as the day she and Jasper met. She trotted along the grassy line between the sidewalk and the street, for all the world like an overdressed jogger. She scanned the front of each house she passed. She could have been looking out for a place she’d left behind—say, in another life. She appraised each property, plot for plot, just as she’d been taught to at her father’s knee. Figures rolled in her head like dice. She squinted like a bookie, doing up odds on his greensheet.
“You know what L.A. really is?” Jasper used to ask, whenever the city was eaten up by fires and quakes and mudslides. “It’s Atlantis—that’s what it is. You wait. Someday, we’re all gonna go to the bottom.”
She had a flash of him lifting a bottle of beer to toast the moment, grinning from ear to ear. It was one of Jasper’s stubborn notions that people shouldn’t get so worked up over owning land, when the land paid no attention. No mention ever made of his own baronial holdings. If he didn’t exactly wish for calamitous times, still, he went into a state of alert whenever they came to pass. Word of a flood or brush fire sharpened his grasp of the world around him. He’d watch the night sky and keep an ear cocked, as if to wait for the aftershock. Vivien didn’t pretend to understand, but she saw now just how well it suited the haunted edge he walked. After all, he had slipped away as he swore he would, to the bottom of the ocean.
The fans outside the gates had missed him more than she, those first few days. This was because she was busy coming down out of thin air. As long as there was someone else to play at it with, stardom was the perfect place to live. Safe as a bulletproof dome, it rode out fires and slides and all the shifts of the earth but fashion. An open ticket went with it, booked to the ends of the earth. But then, at a single stroke—or two or three, whatever it took to slit the wrists—she had no mirror image up there with her anymore. For days she battled the sense of having arrived from outer space. Like somebody cursed with highborn blood in a country torn apart by revolution, trying to pass unnoticed in a peasant skirt and shawl.
Still, the more she walked, the more she saw that grief was not just tears. It was more like a series of explorations, having to do with everyone else and how they all got by. She must have passed a hundred houses, looking in vain for signs of life, before she caught on to the way they were built. Turned in on themselves like sleeping dogs and shut of the street entirely. Vivien had always thought that only the really rich could live in a fortified camp. Now she saw that everyone put up walls who could afford it. They locked themselves in to live as they pleased.
And the reason she knew it was this: A widow was a spy.
She crossed Sunset, but not at a corner, bringing three cars to a halt. Then she made her way into the hills, where the shadows were later still and the green grown deep
as ink. A fondness for desert islands notwithstanding, she knew she wasn’t the type to simply chuck it. She wasn’t out to find a lonely pond to live by. What she needed to ascertain was how much of the world she walked in she could bring home. Was there some sort of quota, like at customs? The road ahead was not just clumps of roses, after all, nor anything so specific as a load of blood-red berries she could tie up in a scarf. It was everything else but the self out here, and nothing to keep it straight but the way one walked.
She had Greg to deal with too, of course. She couldn’t pinpoint when it was she knew for sure, but early on, before Vermont. By some fortuitous cross of planets, she’d found another mirror image before the week was out, just when she’d begun to see she had to live without it.
She’d gone after Greg, from the start, on the hunch that he liked to breeze around as much as she. She guessed he had a secret yen to discover what else was out there. They might have turned out to be perfectly matched. More than anything else, she longed to have someone along when she took off for places unknown. She needed the sort who had a higher calling than going to frivolous cities and powder-white beaches. They would go after things off the normal route: Angkor Wat, Stonehenge, Walden. Turreted, whitewashed monasteries high on the sides of cliffs, accessible only by donkey. Painted caves. Mosques.
As if there could be no boundaries. They had more money to get them there than the world had ways to make things inaccessible.
In the end, she’d had to stop herself. She had no right to take him over. It began to seem the only way to keep them equal was apart. Without a thing like the murder spinning out between them, they’d be lost. They were too much alike, too full of opinions, to be satisfied having each other to tea. They weren’t the sort who could be seen just twice a year. Better to break it clean, without any sop like Christmas cards, or the invitation now and again to parties on the lawn. If it turned out even Greg was something of a phase—bound to be gotten through, hell or high water—then it had to be said that he read like Walden, no less vast for the time allowed.
Out of nowhere, she came to an overgrown fork. There weren’t any smartly lettered signs to label the dead-end streets at either hand. They were all full of last year’s leaves and the ruck of storms. The shrubbery twisting up on every side grew twice as tall as she, so thick with growth it could have been made of stone. She’d stumbled into a cul-de-sac where three estates backed up. A narrow little warren of service roads that had fallen into disuse with the rise of the new breed of servants, who arrived by the front door.
The gardeners didn’t bother tidying it up, treating it rightly as no-man’s-land. The city’s spiffy street machine, with its four-foot brushes and vacuum ducts, couldn’t make it this far into the bush. It was the Beverly Hills equivalent of an alley. Though the amber light of the westering sun still tipped the tops of the trees with gold, it had no further say down here in the deeply shadowed lane. An evening chill had started up. A mountain breeze went riffling through and stirred little twisters among the leaves. There wasn’t a human sound.
All right, she was lost.
She did not have far to go to get found. It wasn’t as if the trail behind her couldn’t be traced right back to the canyon road from which it split. She was only four blocks north of Sunset. But that was all beside the point. She was in a most didactic frame of mind, such that it pleased her to think she was heeding Whitworth’s best advice about getting off the beaten track. She sat on an egg-shaped rock to take the measure of the place. Wrapping her arms about her knees, she sniffed the forest air. A bird she couldn’t see was singing in the hedges.
She realized that if she tunneled through to the close-clipped yards on the other side, there was better than half a chance she’d know these houses instantly. It only made the moment more delicious. If the fantasy that went with fame was the thought of hiding out in the open—under the public’s noses—this took it one step further. A person could still get lost in the places he knew too well.
She studied the bed of leaves about her feet—all coral, russet, here and there shredded as fine as tobacco. A half-eaten orange lay gutted a few feet off, with two bees combing it over. Close by that, someone had flattened a Coors can with his heel, as if to let her see she was not the first. She spied all this with a neutral eye—an eye gone neutral just today, from an overload of seeing. Nothing here wanted the slightest anticipation, human or otherwise.
Things simply happened. A fox-red squirrel ran out of the bushes, saw her, screeched to a halt, and turned tail. He was gone in a moment, absorbed once more by the scenery. Yet she knew more then about squirrels, just from that, than she’d managed to pick up in thirty-two years. She didn’t doubt they had them by the hundreds, roaming the hills round Steepside. But who ever got right down and saw them, with all those windows looking out to China?
She knew what people were going to say. When they saw her starting over, venturing out once more to the main event of the week, they’d assume the convenient thing right off: Vivien Cokes was herself again. A little sadder about the eyes—a fraction less inclined, perhaps, to turn toward the camera. She was the only one who’d ever know there’d been any change at all.
Or to put it another way, the only change they’d look out for now was the one they would hold against her: the business of getting old. Her public image served as a kind of camouflage for all that had befallen her. Her going home would be a snap, compared to how it was for poor Thoreau. The townsmen of Concord, seeing him in their midst again, would have spread the word like lightning: The experiment had failed. They must have been lightheaded with relief, to find that a man couldn’t last forever in a cabin on Walden Pond.
But the cabin on Walden Pond, she thought, could last forever in him. It was more or less what Greg had tried to tell her. Walden wasn’t a place so much as a thing you carried in your head. Well, yes and no. You could look at it that way, certainly, but only once you’d done it. You couldn’t get it out of a book. It had to be gone through, start to finish. Dead of night to midday.
She decided to wait for dark before going on any farther. She hadn’t sat to rest like this in months. Could it be it was just two weeks ago—it seemed a hundred years—that she took a last swim in the waters off Bermuda, late at night? From there to here was a lifetime. After all, she hadn’t planned on bumping into that old bucket on the wall. Hadn’t meant to go back to the house, nor to ride away with Carl. She would only own up to it now, in the twilight hush that filled this minuscule square of wilderness, that what she planned to do that night was not come back at all.
She’d crossed the earth to the last safe place she knew, the coral sea at Harrington Sound, with the thought of swimming out to the open water. One way only. Something drew her back—she felt it—some small detail unimportant as the taste for a feast of clams.
When she found out Jasper beat her to it—drowned, for God’s sake—she no longer had the heart. Once the story swept her up and sent her home to widow, she could not seem to recover the one still point in time She began to make these judgments, moving forward, staring at life with a kind of second sight. She assigned the world its qualities as she saw them, on the spot. There was no end to what she noticed.
The hedges were tight as a tapestry. The sky was still a certain blue, though now, as the day cooled down, grown milky as a pearl. A pair of crickets had started up, and they swept each other like radar. A palm frond lay like a plume on a nearby pile of leaves. The dusky breeze was winter dry, and it seemed so light as to hardly be able to blow the hair across her face.
One hand trailed about in the dirt beside the rock. She sifted and brought up close a couple of brackish seed pods—full of chance like a pair of dice. She bit into a seed and did not wince when it juiced out sour and slimy. She smacked her lips and tried to place it. Classed it among the fruits and nuts. Then wondered what it cured.
As if stuff like this—the merest shit in the road—could bring the dead to life again.
chapter 8
ALL THE WAY HOME from the airport, jouncing around in the back of a ruined taxi, Greg planned to spend the evening up to his eyeballs in junk. He’d had his fill of nuance for a while. Though he knew there would be a week’s mail waiting in a pile, he meant to pick it over quickly, looking out for the tawdriest magazine in the bunch. He would leaf it through till a scandal caught his fancy, then prop it up on the kitchen counter and read it as he ate his way through a stack of jelly sandwiches.
By way of weightier matter, he had the semiliterate memoirs of a starlet tramp on his night stand. He’d already gotten up to World War II before he left. He would doze over that till eleven, whereupon he would flick through the late-night movies, going with the lowliest feature he could find. He sent up a silent prayer for the likes of Veronica Lake.
But, as it turned out, he only got as far as smearing currant jelly edge to edge on a slice of bread when the doorbell rang. It did no good to wait it out. He’d let them take the spare key, so they could go on working while he was away. They’d be damned if they weren’t going to use it one last time. The bell was only a warning, really, rather as if a play were about to start. The Man Who Came to Dinner, say.
“We had a feeling you were home,” said Edna Temple, swinging through the kitchen door. “Didn’t I say so, Sidney?”
Sid was only a beat of the swinging door behind her. He said nothing at first, but made a beeline across the kitchen, where he put the light on under the kettle to make himself some tea.
“We didn’t do shit, the last few days,” he said with a measure of pride. “Mostly, we sat by the pool and got drunk. Did we get a nice tan, do you think?”
